What Do Pro Science Fiction Markets Want?

I was reading David Farland's Kick in the Pants a couple of weeks ago and he recommended reading L. Ron Hubbard's "The Manuscript Factory."  I found a version online, and I have to say I really enjoyed it.  I guess I just like the nuts and bolts approach to success as a science fiction writer much more than the artsy take so many seem to restrict it to (and are in turn restricted by).

In any case, one of Hubbard's recommendations was that your stories always have at least 5 markets they would appeal to.  So how do you accomplish that?  One way would be to just assume that any of the markets on the SFWA pro list would be a potential market for whatever speculative fiction you happen to write, but I've found myself having a hard time drilling down to which market on the list would be the best fit for a particular story.  It's not a long list, but every market has its own emphases/flavors, and many of them spell out exactly what they're looking for on their submissions pages.

So with that in mind, I've decided to start  a short series of entries tagged MarketWants where I'll just break down the markets by what kinds of stories or what elements in the stories the markets say they want.  It won't be based on any "insider knowledge" or anything, just what the markets openly profess on their websites that they are looking for.  This is mostly just to help me personally to better focus my stories on the areas that are most marketable, but hopefully others will find the information useful as well.

I of course am curious to see what story attributes end up at the top of the list.

Am I Competing Against Other Writers?

I keep reading postings on authors’ websites (for example, here) about how writers aren’t competing with each other, if someone else sells a book, it doesn’t mean I won’t sell mine, we’re all in this together, blah blah blah…. 

 

It’s not that it’s annoying me (per se), it’s just that the idea seems so prevalent (a quick Google search yielded here, here, and here, for example) and yet is so mathematically unfounded…at least in my (I believe justified) opinion.

So some quick math (yay):

A writer’s probability Pof getting published comes down to two variables (ignoring the option of self-publication for the moment): the number of opportunities for publication, X, and the number of writers trying to snag one of those opportunities, Y.  The probability is a fraction, P = X/Y.  Pretty straightforward.

Introductory calculus tells us that if we hold X constant (meaning we have a fixed number of opportunities for publication), then as Y gets larger (meaning there are more and more writers trying to get published), the limit as Y goes to infinity is zero.  In other words, the more writers trying to nab one of those publication slots, the less likely it is for any of them to get one.  Conversely, in this scenario, fewer writers trying to get published would increase the probability of publication for any given writer.

Similarly, if we hold Yconstant (a fixed number of writers), then as X gets smaller (meaning more and more publication opportunities are being taken by other writers), the limit as Xgoes to zero is zero.  In other words, the more writers get published, the less likely it is for any of the other writers to get published.  Conversely, fewer writers taking up publication slots increases (temporarily) the likelihood that any given writer will get published.

Now this probably isn’t applicable for authors who are already published (like in Scalzi’s case, where he’s talking about book sales, since he and Dan Brown are already published), where there are other market forces at play, but for the majority of aspiring writers, there are only so many publishing opportunities to go around.

Using the SFWA list of professional publications, I figure there are about 1,000 opportunities to have a short story published per year, accounting for professional magazines that publish a set number of stories daily, weekly, quarterly, etc.  Whatever the actual number is, it’s a fixed number.  The number of writers trying for those slots is roughly fixed as well, though I have no idea what it is.  I do know that one magazine I’ve submitted to a few times always has about 60 stories in the queue, so figure about 60 submissions per day for every magazine, which gives very roughly about 500,000 submissions to pro magazines per year.  Again, whatever the actual number is, it’s fixed.

The more writers there are “competing,” the lower the probability of success.  The more writers achieve success, the lower the probability that anyone else will have it.  At least in this context -- though I would expect it to extend beyond professional short story publications to other mediums as well.

Assuming for a minute that these numbers are correct, an author trying to get published this year could expect a probability of about 0.002, or 1 in 500.  Not terrible, but it means the average writer could expect to have about 500 rejections before getting published.  Naturally, there’s a lot of variation between authors, and many (most likely the successful ones who write about how we’re not competing with each other…) will publish much sooner than that.  And they probably have strong anecdotal evidence that says it doesn't matter, that they're not competing with anyone else.  After all, they got published, and no one else's success impeded them one bit.  Right?  But then there are the many writers on the other side of the curve, who will take much longer than 500 submissions -- or at least they would if they didn’t give up long before getting that far, which is what I imagine happens to most.  There are obviously major differences in writing ability between authors, and I like to think that it’s the better ones who get those limited few publication slots.  But what if, hypothetically speaking, every writer was at the exact same skill level?  There’d still be only 1,000 slots available. 

It’s a numbers game.

Nothing against self-publication, and certainly nothing against celebrating other writers’ achievements and trying not to have a cutthroat capitalistic perspective on it all, but don’t lie to yourself!  I can see why it’s not necessarily intuitive.  It doesn’t seem fair.  But the numbers is what they is.

First Six Months Statistics

Alright, so it's been over six months now since I wrote my first short story, and it seems like a good time to look back and see what the first six months as a writer looks like (for me, anyway).  This is of course going to look very different from some writers' beginning experience (most of my stories so far have been short flash fiction types of stories), but I think it will probably look very similar to what many others have/will experience(d), so here it is:

From November 2012 through April 2013, I wrote 15 short stories, and I submitted those stories 22 times (total) to 10 different magazines that publish science fiction (6 times to Daily Science Fiction, 5 times to Flash Fiction Online, 3 times to Clarkesworld, 2 times to 100 Word Stories, and once each to 365 Tomorrows, EscapePod, Every Day Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Mad Scientist Journal, and Strange Horizons).

Of these 22 submissions, 16 got form letter rejections, 2 got rejections with comments (Every Day Fiction and Lightspeed Magazine), 2 got rejected at the final stage (Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online), one got accepted (Mad Scientist Journal), and one never got a response (365 Tomorrows).  Average response time for these submissions (excluding the one with no response) was 21 days.

So yeah, a lot of rejection, but I definitely feel like I've made progress over the past few months.  The two that made it to the final round at professional publications especially make me feel like I'm getting better/closer.  So I'm going to go ahead and predict that the next 6 months will see a few more acceptances...but I guess we'll find out in November.

How Long Does It Take to Get Published?

I’ve been looking at my submission stats so far and wanted something to compare them to, so I dug around a little and came up with the experiences of these three science fiction authors (this is just based on a cursory look at their blogs--I may have understood some of the numbers incorrectly):

John Scalzi (soon-to-be-former SFWA President, 9 novels and some novellas, short stories, etc.): Started writing science fiction at age 28, contract signed for debut novel at 33, debut novel published at 35, won John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at age 37 (see full timeline here).

Jamie Todd Reuben (8 short stories): Decided to become a professional science fiction writer at age 21, first story accepted for publication at age 34, second professional story accepted at age 37, third professional story accepted at age 38.  Altogether, “14 years, 30 stories, and nearly 100 rejections before [his] first story sale (see full timeline here).

Tobias S. Buckell (50 short stories, 7 novels): No age timeline, but in an essay wrote, “my own record is 24 rejections before selling a single story,” and “I have over 650 rejections logged in my files” (see full essay here).

So, obviously, it would be kind of hard to make any specific generalizations about how long it takes to become a professional writer based on this small, nonrandom, anecdotal sample, but it does give you a soft feel for what may be typical.  Dozens to hundreds of rejections over several years or even decades….  Since I started writing in November, I guess I should plan on seeing some success around 2017.

How to Start Writing Fiction

Okay, so on the topic of beginning writers, I thought I'd devote a post to how I got started.  I'm planning on devoting some time to statistics (number of stories, number of submissions, number of journals submitted to, etc.) later, but for now this is purely anecdotal.

In November of last year (2012), I was listening to NPR on my way to work on the 4th or 5th of the month, and I heard a story about NaNoWriMo.  Totally on a whim, I decided to do it, even though I had already missed a few days, and I had never written fiction before (aside from a school project in like 4th grade).  Fortunately, I had some down time, and I figured -- why not?  So I seriously just opened up a Word document on my laptop and started writing the first thing that came to my mind, and then I kept going, writing almost every day, and I had made it to almost exactly 50,000 (a couple of words over) when I finally wrote THE END on the last day of the month.  I was proud of myself for having "won," and I was surprised at how much I had enjoyed it.

When I first decided to do NaNoWriMo, I had figured I'd get bored with it and stop writing after I finished the contest, but it never happened, so I just kept writing.  I even started thinking about ideas for stories on my drives to/from work, and I would write them down on my breaks.  I actually had a short story submitted to a magazine before I even finished NaNoWriMo.

My writing has ebbed and flowed in the six months since I submitted that first story, but my interest hasn't waned a bit.  So now the trick is getting published.  More on that later, but as obvious as it sounds, for me the trick to getting started as a writer was just a matter of starting to write.